[...] He was wearing a pair of jeans and a black V-neck T-shirt and one of those checked seventies lumberjack jackets and a pair of baseball boots, I think, and I sat down next to him and asked him about music. He went on about Wire, Pink Flag, which was fine with me, but then he had this thing about Neil Young, he kept going on about Neil Young, about how his Harvest album was like the true country, none of this Acuff and Rose bullshit, he kept saying, which meant nothing to me at the time, and he had this weird thing that he would do with his eyebrow where he would just raise his right eyebrow for a millisecond and it was like a bird shrugging, a bird flying away and shrugging and saying, you know, what do you expect, it’s what I do, something like that, and I was impressed, this guy is living it, I thought to my teenage self, living what, I don’t know, but then the thing that compounded it was when my sister told me that when he took his jeans off the night before he had no scants on, no underwear whatsoever, just his naked balls underneath the denim. It blew my mind, just naked balls, I thought, what an idea. I had been brought up on things like combs and toothpaste and socks and vests and underwear. It was crazy to me. I asked her, doesn’t it stink, I said, doesn’t it leave a stain? He said he washed his jeans when they got dirty, she said. Besides, she said, he doesn’t care about stinks or stuff like that. Then she smirked and said that she thought it was sexy, this penis so near the surface, just ready to strike, not caged up or anything. I admit I was a convert. From that day on I threw all of my scants in the bin and just walked about with my bollocks hanging carefree. After that it was every man for himself.

SH: I worked in a shoe shop in Coatbridge for one day and got fired. I couldn’t be arsed going into the stock room and finding different sizes so I would just automatically tell people that everything was out of stock. You genuinely can’t be arsed, the manager said to me, can you? He seemed kind of impressed, in a way. That’s well observed, I said, and after that it was all over. Of course I had a paper round, my dad was always putting my name down for paper rounds. Everyone in Airdrie had a paper round at some point. That’s a real job right there, he would say, and of course I would just go dump all of the papers behind a fucking hedge at Easter Moffat Golf Club and be done with it.